Indian Agriculture Towards 2030

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Opinion

KATHMANDU, Nepal, Apr 4 2022 (IPS) – India began its journey as an independent nation in 1947 with fresh memory of the Bengal Famine of 1943 which claimed 1.5 to 3 million lives. Against this backdrop, the First Five Year Plan (1951-56) prioritized agriculture which, however, shifted to heavily industrialization in the second Plan.

Shyam Khadka

The mid-1960s was a difficult time when consecutive droughts hit food production and India had to import about 11 million metric ton (MMT) of wheat per year – about 15% of its domestic food grain production – under US Public Law 480. With the availability of high yielding miracle seeds of wheat and rice accompanied by increasing use of chemical fertilisers, provision of minimum support price (MSP) for rice and wheat, expansion in irrigated area, and gradual mechanization of farms, Indian agri-food system fortunately took a definitive positive turn beginning late 1960s. As a result, India has become the largest producer of milk (187.7 MMT in 2019-20) and cotton (37.5 million bales in 2019-20) and the second largest producer of rice (117.5 MMT in 2019-20) and wheat (106.2 MMT in 2019-20), fruits (97.97 MMT in 2018-19) and vegetables (183.17 MMT in 2018-19). India today is not only food self-sufficient but also a net exporter of agricultural produce. In short, the success of Indian agriculture in last six decades has been nothing less than spectacular.

The success, however, has come with significant costs. The resource intensification that the Green Revolution requires has adversely affected natural resources and environment. India pumped 245 million cubic meters – about 25 percent of total groundwater withdrawn globally – for irrigation in 2011. As a result, ground water in 1,034 blocks (16% of total blocks) are over-exploited. Worse, ground water table has become critical in 4% and semi-critical in 10% of the blocks. Similarly, some 37% of land area in the country (120.4 mn ha) is affected by various types of land degradation. Subsidy policy-induced non-judicious use of fertilizers has led to the chemicalization of soil and pollution of water through leaching and run-off. Despite abundant supply of food grains, in 2020 41.7% of under-5 children suffered from stunting. India is home to 208.6 million – or over a quarter – of world’s undernourished people. Other challenges that Indian agriculture faces today include uneven regional growth, rising fiscal constraints, mounting and unsustainable level of subsidies, small holding size and further fragmentation of holdings and accompanying land tenurial issues, and low resource use efficiency, particularly of water. These factors act as serious impediments for sustained agricultural growth and farmers’ livelihoods.

Amidst the success and emerging challenges NITI Aayog, the apex public policy think tank of the Government of India and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) decided to facilitate a national dialogue among key stakeholders including government agencies, academia, civil society organisations, farmers, private sector, international organizations, media and others to articulate a vision for 2030 and pathways for the remandating of agriculture in India. To this end, 10 thematic papers were commissioned from distinguished professionals. A 3-day national dialogue entitled, ‘Indian Agriculture Towards 2030: Pathways for enhancing Farmers’ Income, Nutritional Security and Sustainable Food and Farm Systems” was held in January 2021. NITI Aayog and FAO have now come up with a publication with the same title (Chand, R., Joshi, P, and Khadka, S., Editors (2022), Springer).

In addition to the challenges enumerated above the books also deals with issues of climate change and its impact on agricultural production and farmers’ incomes and the strategies to mitigate such change; growing incidence of pests, pandemics, and transboundary diseases and threat to biosecurity affecting agricultural production; and alternative farming systems for transformative and sustainable agroecology and biodiverse future. The role of science, technology and innovation is identified as key to sustainable and resilient agriculture. Similarly, role of structural reforms and governance are discussed in detail and the role of price policies, market reforms and institutions are being highlighted for an efficient, inclusive and sustainable agriculture.

The National Dialogue identified pathways for transformation with emphasis on remandating Indian agriculture in a way that makes it more productive, efficient, resilient, resource conserving, nutrition centered and globally focused. These transformational outcomes are to be achieved by focusing on following pathways:

    • Increasing investment in agriculture, first to reverse the declining trend and then achieving ‘efficient’ growth rather than growth alone, increased adoption of improved technology, reorienting agricultural science, technology and innovations, applying digital solutions and artificial intelligence, better use of information and communication technology, application of One Health concept;
    • Making Indian agriculture globally-focused, shifting attention from self-sufficiency to adding value through increased processing and achieving a high rate of export growth
    • Enhancing the efficiency of the water and other resources, mainly by correcting distorted water pricing, adopting water conserving technologies and agro-ecological approach, changes in the cropping pattern, and reversing neglect of rainfed areas;
    • Making agriculture climate resilient, by adopting several no-regret technological and institutional options as well as by undertaking more targeted research, use of big data analytics, and adoption of a science-based and green growth approach;
    • Tackling nutrition and food safety, by diversifying diet, reducing post-harvest losses, encouraging bio-fortifications, empowering women, enforcing food safety standards, improving water sanitation and hygiene, and promoting food safety awareness and nutrition education;
    • Focusing sharply on innovations, incentives and institutions that contribute to enhance productivity, enhance resilience to climate change, incentivize water and energy conservation, and by adopting more conducive regulatory environment such as for exploiting ground water; and
    • Adopting appropriate policies and improving governance such as by reducing distortion caused by the MSP, accelerating rural infrastructure creation, ensuring greater engagement of the state governments, enhancing access to credit and extension services, and expansion of contract farming.

As emphasised by Honourable M. Venkaiah Naidu, Vice-President of India in his foreword, the book ‘provides a sound basis for reflection because they distil important lessons and present an array of policy options for the government to choose from’.

Shyam Khadka is a former senior official of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations who served as representative in India (2015-18) and was Senior Portfolio Manager in United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (1997-2014). An international development professional, Khadka works on policies, programs and projects that aim at developing agriculture, ensuring food security, and reducing poverty globally.

IPS UN Bureau

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In Sri Lanka, Rajapaksas on the Ropes

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Opinion

There were widespread reports over the weekend of hundreds of demonstrators demanding the resignation of the family-run Rajapaksa government. Credit: Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

LONDON, Apr 4 2022 (IPS) – With the economy in freefall and basics such as food and fuel in dangerously short supply, there is mounting public anger against a failing and desperate government in Sri Lanka.

‘O tempora, O mores,’ said the Roman orator Cicero in a plaintive cry, denouncing the political and social norms of Rome in 70 BC.

Unlike the Romans, the people of Sri Lanka have not left it to politicians or orators to berate what they perceive as their rudderless rulers. They have taken on the task themselves, going into the streets to decry their government in words more telling and malignant than any Cicero might have employed.

They watch as their once ‘Resplendent Isle’ hurtles downhill while confused rulers try desperately to halt its economic and social collapse.

Never in the history of modern Sri Lanka have its citizens queued up for hours to purchase one or two cylinders of cooking gas or a few litres of petrol or kerosene, while a wide range of other shortages continue to plague the country.

If in Ukraine civilians are dying because of the indiscriminate and inconsiderate shelling and bombing by Russian forces, in Sri Lanka they are dying on their feet, some having waited for pre-dawn hours for gas or kerosene to cook what little food they could muster to feed hungry families.

As I write this in late March, reports are pouring in of four people from different parts of the country dying within 48 hours. That is not surprising at a time when the Covid pandemic still persists.

But these four died while waiting in gas or petrol queues, three of then possibly of exhaustion after standing for many hours, and the fourth of stab wounds during an altercation at a filling station.

Today, history is being made. But it is not in the manner the country’s rulers –the powerful Rajapaksa family from Sri Lanka’s south, whose political antecedents go back to the 1930s–ever expected.

Today, the wheel of political fortune has inexorably turned.

It was over a decade ago that two of the Rajapaksa brothers, Mahinda and Gotabaya, were hailed as national heroes for their roles in defeating the dreaded Tamil Tiger separatists in May 2009, after a war that lasted nearly three decades.

Mahinda was then Sri Lanka’s president and Gotabaya his defence secretary.

In April 2019, a couple of days after jihadist terrorists suicide-bombed three churches and three luxury hotels on Easter Sunday, killing some 270 locals and foreigners and wounding another 500, Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced his presidential ambitions.

Politically untested, the former military officer promised enhanced national security, peace, political stability, economic recovery and preservation of Sri Lanka’s 2500-year Buddhist heritage.

In November that year he won the presidential election with 6.9 million votes and in August 2020 Mahinda Rajapaksa led the Sri Lanka People’s Party (SLPP) to victory at the parliamentary election with a near two-thirds majority.

But today, the wheel of political fortune has inexorably turned. Last month in a Gallup-style opinion poll conducted by a local think tank, Veritḗ Research found that only 10 per cent of those queried said they approved of the current government.

Rudderless Rulers

Such is public antipathy that long queues of people spending hours to buy a packet or two of powdered milk booed the president as he passed by.

Some days later busloads of women, led by a former MP whose politician father was shot dead by a rival, who was convicted of murder, sentenced to death but then pardoned by President Gotabaya last year and given a state job, demonstrated outside the president’s private residence.

Teachers, health workers and other trade union-led employees have gone on strike at various times. Farmers have taken to the streets, protesting against the overnight ban last May of chemical fertiliser that saw some rice fields and other agricultural land abandoned and export-earning tea and rubber plantations affected.

Over the past months effigies of the Agriculture Minister have been burnt and posters of the Rajapaksas (four of the brothers are cabinet ministers and so is Mahinda’s eldest son) have been torn or otherwise defaced in blatant displays of public anger and lack of faith in a government that has failed to provide uninterrupted supplies of basics such as electricity, gas, petrol and kerosene, and essential foods and medicines.

It has been said that even the dead have no peace. Some crematoriums have stopped functioning unless they can be certain of continuous electricity.

Outages lasting several hours have often brought factories to a halt. Thermal power stations and other power providers cannot operate continuously for lack of fuel and coal.

Fast depleting foreign reserves have forced the government to slash imports of food, fuel, diesel and gas, compelling many restaurants, bakeries and wayside eateries, as well as other enterprises, to close or restrict their business.

Meanwhile, prices of food and domestic essentials and transport costs have skyrocketed, driving many families, particularly daily wage earners, into penury and starvation.

With foreign reserves at the end of February down to a perilous US$ 2.3 billion and some $7 billion in sovereign debt and loan repayments due this year – including a $1 billion repayment in July – the Rajapaksas turned from their traditional friend and ally China, which that has extended financial help over the years, to neighbouring nations.

A currency swap was arranged with Bangladesh, and last month Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa flew to New Delhi for meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, urging help to rescue Colombo from its foreign exchange crisis.

Never in the history of modern Sri Lanka have its citizens queued for hours to buy fuel

New Delhi extended a $1 billion credit facility to enable the purchase of food, medicines and other essentials. This brought Indian assistance this year to $1.4 billion, which included a $400 million currency swap, besides another half a billion-dollar line of credit for essential fuel imports, and the deferring of a $500 million loan and.

Meanwhile China is considering another $2.5 billion in fresh assistance, China’s ambassador to Sri Lanka stated while turning down the deferment of a loan.

Even as Sri Lanka turns to Asia’s two leading powers, both vying for larger footprints in Sri Lanka, with its strategic location in the Indian Ocean, Colombo has finally turned to the IMF for belated assistance due to internal dissension in the ruling coalition.

President Rajapaksa recently sacked two ministers from minor coalition partners for criticising government policy and attacking Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa, who has dual Sri Lankan-US citizenship, for bending backwards to satisfy American interests.

Some other state ministers have resigned or been removed as internal squabbles begin to take a toll on stability in the 11-party coalition.

With the economy in tatters and mounting public wrath against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, with calls of ‘Gota Go Home’, he summoned an all-party conference late last month in the hope of showing a friendly face and seeking solutions to the country’s economic catastrophe.

While some minority Tamil parties which had long sought a meeting with the president and some other parties attended, two of the leading opposition parties, which recently launched anti-government demonstrations, boycotted the conference.

It started on a sour note, with many-time prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe putting the Governor of the Central Bank Nivard Cabraal in his place for unwanted political remarks, for which President Rajapaksa apologised to Mr Wickremesinghe.

To the average Sri Lankan who has witnessed such conferences over the years, including ones to bring racial peace to a divided country, they are an exercise in political waffling and time-wasting.

With Sri Lanka’s biggest national celebration, the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, in mid-April, the working and middle-class families now struggling to survive wonder whether there will be anything to celebrate. Even if families can get together for the traditional meals, will they be able to cook them for lack of gas and kerosene?

Will this April be the cruellest month?

Source: Asian Affairs, London

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for foreign media, including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently, he was Sri Lanka’s deputy high commissioner in London

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Do we Really Need a World Ranking to Measure Happiness?

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Opinion

Credit: UN Women

KATHMANDU, Nepal, Mar 29 2022 (IPS) – The 10th edition of the World Happiness Report was recently published and once again the findings raised an array of mixed emotions with many questioning the real foundations underpinning the most discussed aspect of the Report, the World Happiness Ranking,

For example, according to the ranking, Nepal appears to be the happiest place in the South Asia but is it really the case? Many experts from the country doubt about it as it was reported by The Kathmandu Post on the 22nd of March.

In the article, Dambar Chemjong, head of the Central Department of Anthropology at Tribhuvan University simply asks “What actually constitutes happiness?”

This is a complex question to answer but certainly it is fair to wonder how come each time this report gets published, it is inevitable that the richest nations, especially the Nordic ones come up on the top while the poorest and more fragile ones instead are hopelessly at the bottom.

There is no doubt that material prosperity determines a person’s quality of life and the World Happiness Report looks at GDP and life expectancy. In addition, the report also explores other factors like generosity, social support, freedom, and corruption.

These six variables, put together, are central to depict what the report calls “life evaluations” that “provide the most informative measure for international comparisons because they capture quality of life in a more complete and stable way than emotional reports based on daily experiences”.

The ranking is based on the Gallup World Poll, that asks “respondents to evaluate their current life as a whole using the mental image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and worst possible as a 0”.

One of the key findings is that social connections in dire times, especially if we think about what the entire world had to endure following the pandemic, do make the difference.

“Now, at a time of pandemic and war, we need such an effort more than ever. And the lesson of the World Happiness Report over the years is that social support, generosity to one another, and honesty in government are crucial for well-being” says Jeffrey Sachs, one of the major “architects” behind the entire concept of measuring happiness worldwide.

This statement further validates the need to further think more broadly about the importance these social relationships and social bonds have in developing nations.

That’s why analyzing happiness across nations should be considered as a working progress and the goal should be to better picture the complex situations on the ground in many parts of the developing world.

These are all nations that have been experiencing hardships consistently, even before the Covid pandemic outbreak and, therefore, they should be acknowledged for having developed unique forms of social bonds and solidarity.

Instead, these social factors, these connectors and the levels of reliance stemming from them in these “unhappy” nations”, are overshadowed by some of the variables determining the life evaluations.

People in developing nations have less access to public services and they are more exposed to corruption and bad governance. Lack of health infrastructures or unequal job market do have a strong incidence in determining a person’s human development and quality of life.

Yet does the fact that their lives are tougher automatically means people are there are unhappy?

Moreover, should not we consider the stress and mental health often affecting the “prosperous” lives of the citizens living in the north of the world?

Probably the problem is the idea of having a ranking itself. Though desirable and useful, measuring real happiness is a daunting and complex job.

Trust, benevolence, real generosity (not just the extrapolated, like in the report, based on donations during the last month) are all key determinants of happiness.

Yet these same factors have always been strong in developing societies where people rely on mutuality and self-help rather than depending on governments unable to fulfill their duties.

As it is now, the World Happiness Ranking risks to become just a “plus” version of the Human Development Index.

There is still a long way to better decipher and understand the meaning of happiness in the so called South of the World.

There is also a great need for the authors to better explain in simpler terms their methodology of calculating the ranking especially the relationships between the six key variables analyzed and positive and negative emotions that are also taken into consideration.

The fact that the ranking and the science behind the report is still a working process, it is recognized in the report itself.

An option would be to re-consider the variables of “life evaluations” that, by default, underscore the concept of wellbeing from a western perspective.

On the positive side, it is encouraging to see how the report includes also a part on “cross-Cultural Perspectives on Balance/Harmony”, central if we want to have a less westernized approach to happiness.

The 2022 edition of the Report devotes also considerable space to the biological basis of happiness, the relationships between genes and environment, what the report calls “Gene-Environment Interplay”.

Such nexus, affecting a person’s feelings and emotions and all the intricacies coming from these interactions, should make us reflect if it is really worthy to continue pursuing the goal of having an annual global ranking on happiness.

The idea of a ranking on happiness risks defeating the purpose of the gigantic and noble effort of better understanding how we can be happier and how public policies can have a role or not in these unfolding dynamics.

Simone Galimberti is Co-Founder of ENGAGE, an NGO partnering with youths living with disabilities. Opinions expressed are personal.

IPS UN Bureau

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Donors Must Rethink Africa’s Flagging Green Revolution, New Evaluation Shows (Commentary)

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BOSTON, Mar 23 2022 (IPS) – • A scathing new analysis of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) finds that the program is failing at its objective to increase food security on the continent, despite massive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the US, UK, and German governments.

• On March 30, critics of AGRA will brief U.S. congressional aides about why they think it is doing more harm than good.

• As fertilizer and food prices spike with rising energy prices from the Russia-Ukraine war, African farmers and governments need the kind of resilient, low-cost alternatives that techniques like agroecology offer, a new opinion piece argues.

A critical new donor-funded evaluation of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has confirmed what African civil society and faith leaders have claimed: “AGRA did not meet its headline goal of increased incomes and food security for 9 million smallholders.”

The evaluation should be a wake up call, and not just for the private and bilateral donors that have bankrolled this 15-year-old effort to the tune of $1 billion. It should also rouse African governments to repurpose their agricultural subsidies from the Green Revolution package of commercial seeds and fertilizers to agroecology and other low-cost, low-input approaches. They have been providing as much as $1 billion per year for such input subsidies.

Failing Africa’s farmers

Carried out by consulting firm Mathematica, the evaluation confirms that the Green Revolution has failed to achieve AGRA’s stated goal to “catalyze a farming revolution in Africa.”

Wambui Mwihaki, a farmer from central Kenya, takes stock of her thriving maize crop following adoption of agroecology. Credit: David Njagi for Mongabay.

The assessment was funded by AGRA’s primary sponsor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on behalf of other lead donors in AGRA’s Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa (PIATA): the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office; the Rockefeller Foundation; the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The evaluation includes a summary of findings, a statistical appendix, and AGRA’s formal responses to the findings, all available publicly.

Such transparency is welcome. AGRA has been plagued by a lack of accountability since its founding in 2006. I undertook my own assessment of AGRA in 2020 when I could find no comprehensive analysis, from AGRA nor its donors, of its progress toward ambitious goals to double yields and incomes for 30 million small-scale farming families while halving food insecurity by 2020. Using national-level data, I found little evidence of progress, with meager productivity increases, little progress on poverty, and a 31% increase in the number of undernourished people in AGRA’s 13 focus countries.

The new evaluation is far from comprehensive. It covers only AGRA’s last five years of work, ignoring its first 10. It reports on results in just six of AGRA’s current 11 focus countries. Its data on yields is almost exclusively on maize and rice, to the exclusion of the many other staple food crops crucial to Africans’ sustenance. And it fails to incorporate or address the concerns raised publicly by African civil society and faith leaders in public letters to AGRA’s donors.

Agroforestry is a kind of agroecology where crops are grown in combination with trees, like this pumpkin that Eunice Manyi raised among fruit trees in Kenya. Credit: David Njagi for Mongabay.

Still, the findings about poor outcomes for farmers should raise concerns for private and bilateral donors to AGRA’s PIATA strategy and for the African governments that are active partners – and funders – in that effort.

Quoting from the evaluation:

    • “PIATA improved maize yields in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Nigeria, but not in Tanzania, Burkina Faso, or Kenya.” Maize is AGRA’s most heavily supported crop, so the failure to achieve yield growth in half the countries studied is alarming.
    • “Across these six countries, only farmers in Burkina Faso experienced improved maize sales as a result of PIATA.” This raises serious questions about the Green Revolution “theory of change.” Even when yields rose, they failed to translate into rising incomes for farmers.
    • “Farmers who adopted improved inputs and experienced yield increases were typically younger, male, and relatively wealthier…. productivity and income gains were also concentrated among these relatively high-resource farmers.” This finding directly contradicts the stated goals of USAID and other bilateral donors to ensure that their assistance programs benefit and empower women.
    • “AGRA’s next strategy could formally recognize that agricultural technologies and practices—such as fertilizer use and rice cultivation—can negatively impact environmental conditions and greenhouse gas emissions.” Evaluators fault AGRA on a wide range of environmentally damaging impacts, including a lack of attention to helping farmers adapt to climate change.
    • “AGRA surveys are currently not suited for rigorous impact analysis.” Evaluators offer many criticisms of the initiative’s poor monitoring and evaluation methods.

Time to rethink Green Revolution model

Evaluators gave AGRA credit for some of its work, saying it “was successful in developing key policy reforms, mobilizing flagships and partnerships, and reaching farmers with extension and seeds,” and it helped “incentivize private sector engagement in the production and delivery of improved seeds in some countries.”

But these intermediate objectives, carried out with substantial funding over 15 years, have thus far failed to further the goals of improving farmers’ productivity, incomes, and food security. When one’s development successes fail to produce the intended results, after 15 years and one billion dollars in donor funding, it is time to reconsider the efficacy of the initiative. It is time to rethink the Green Revolution model.

See related: Push-pull agroecology method debugs organic farming’s pest problem in Kenya

Farmers with seeds in West Africa. Image courtesy of Grassroots International.

AGRA’s management responded to the evaluation saying, “We must therefore rethink our models and focus our support, and that of our partners, on building resilience and adaptation specifically for smallholder farmers.” But there is little sign AGRA intends to pull back from its costly input-intensive Green Revolution model. AGRA president Agnes Kalibata recently defended the status quo in a Q&A with the East African.

Hopefully donors and African governments will take the new evaluation more seriously. African civil society and faith leaders have urged donors to shift their funding to agroecology and other low-cost, low-input systems, which were endorsed last year by the U.N. Committee on World Food Security as a key strategy for climate-resilient development. Such approaches have shown far better results, raising yields across a range of food crops, increasing productivity over time as soil fertility improves, increasing incomes and reducing risk for farmers by cutting input costs, and improving food security and nutrition from a diverse array of crops.

USAID was quick to reject any change in aid priorities. A spokesperson told US Right to Know, “USAID reviewed the findings and recommendations and is satisfied with the independence and rigor of the [Mathematica] evaluation. We appreciate AGRA’s response to the report conclusions and concur with their proposed next steps to improve performance outcomes.”

That will not satisfy African civil society and faith leaders, who were not consulted for the Mathematica evaluation. They plan to take their complaints to the U.S. Congress, which this year has to reauthorize funding for AGRA through its Feed the Future initiative. On March 30, they will brief congressional aides in a closed-door session to explain why the supposed beneficiaries think AGRA is doing more harm than good. As evaluators acknowledge, the main beneficiaries are wealthier male farmers, an outcome at odds with the stated goals of U.S. development policy.

As fertilizer and food prices spike with rising energy prices from the Russia-Ukraine war, African farmers and governments need the kind of resilient, low-cost alternatives agroecology offers. Kenyan farmers report today that the biofertilizers they make themselves from locally available materials cost one-quarter the price of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers.

African governments should recognize that continuing to subsidize increasingly expensive synthetic fertilizer is a losing proposition, especially when that and other Green Revolution inputs are producing such meager results.

It is time for private and bilateral donors – and African governments – to stop throwing good money after bad and recognize that their 15-year effort to “catalyze a farming revolution in Africa” through Green Revolution seeds and fertilizers has fallen short. Fortunately, more promising alternatives are proving their efficacy all over the world. They deserve support.

Timothy A. Wise is a Senior Research Fellow at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute. A detailed analysis of the recent evaluation of AGRA is available from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), where the author is a senior advisor.

IPS UN Bureau

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How Collective Action Can Move the Needle on Gender Equality

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Delegates take a group photo at the Young Leaders & Alumni Workshop at the Women Deliver 2019 Conference in Vancouver, Canada. Credit: Isabella Sarmiento

NEW YORK, Mar 18 2022 (IPS) – During this year’s sixty-sixth session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW66), we are eager to see the global community pivot towards more inclusive approaches to advocacy. It’s imperative to put the spotlight on women’s rights and youth-led organizations in communities that are often left out of key discussions. By handing the mic over to advocates across all backgrounds and ages, we can shift to a model that enables all advocates to take a lead role in policy-making and ultimately translate promises and rhetoric into real impact and accountability.

Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ways that the global community works together to push for inclusive progress toward gender equality — progress that fully and effectively engages and equally benefits everyone — are fundamentally changing. Private conversations between the organizations and people with the resources and privilege to access the halls of power have given way to hybrid events and videoconferences that are open to a more diverse, intergenerational set of stakeholders than ever before. This significant shift began to open the doors to more inclusive partnerships.

Also, during these past two years, a global reckoning called on us all to meaningfully transform our advocacy, practices, and programs. International development organizations, including our own, took a long, overdue look in the mirror, and in some cases, began the deep learning and unlearning needed to acknowledge the persistent power imbalances that plague our sector at large. It’s a first step in living up to the values of equity and inclusion — not just on paper, but in practice.

As the world as we know it changed, we were hard at work changing, too. We began actively leveraging our power and influence more intentionally than ever before to center the work and expertise of women’s rights and youth-led organizations in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Now, we are digging deeper to find and use new tools that enable advocates to co-create and co-lead by themselves so that our work and the Women Deliver 2023 Conference (WD2023) is more inclusive, diverse, consultative, and accessible than ever before.

Young gender equality advocates kick off the Youth Zone at the Women Deliver 2019 Conference in Vancouver, Canada. Credit: This Is It Studios

In “calling us in” and championing our ability to foster more inclusive partnerships across all of our programs, we are taking action to effectively and authentically advocate for, with, and alongside girls and women everywhere, in all their intersecting identities, to catalyze lasting progress on gender equality.

Transforming ourselves is of course a continuous process. Each day, we are learning to do better and to be better. We hope that our key learnings, below, can support our development colleagues, wherever they find themselves on their journey.

1. Accessibility and inclusion must lead the way — in-person and virtually.

    According to expert studies, organizations and individuals from LMICs are often under-represented at global health convenings. From day one, it’s urgent to intentionally engage those who have historically been excluded. In planning WD2023, we have leveraged the lessons of the past two years and from prior Women Deliver Conferences. We used an open application to select one-third of our Conference Advisory Group — a diverse panel with a balance of technical expertise. Our advisors represent 30 organizations — 10 individuals are from youth or youth-led organizations and 35 are from LMICs. We have done this to ensure that the Conference is co-created from the start by organizations and individuals representing the intersectional identities of the girls and women we work with and for.

    We meet regularly via videoconference with our Advisory Group to co-create the Conference’s Global Dialogue, theme, programming, and more, with support from social impact design experts at IDEO.org. IDEO also supports us as we carry out targeted discussions with specific stakeholder groups, including Women Deliver Young Leaders and Alumni, Deliver for Good Country Coalitions, and Conference Sponsors and Funders.

    In planning how to shape the dialogue, foster collaboration, and drive collective action before, during, and after the Conference, we’re working with our partners to ensure that all Conference advocacy spaces, be they digital or physical, are accessible to all. This includes low-bandwidth options, closed captioning, interpretation in multiple languages, and International Sign Language. On-site, we will also provide trauma-informed specialists, breastfeeding/nursing stations, child safeguarding support, and mental health specialists.

Mme Safiétou Diop, President of Réseau Siggil Jigeen speaking at a press conference during the launch of the Deliver for Good Senegal Campaign in Dakar, Senegal in 2019.

2. Move from meaningful youth engagement to co-leadership and intergenerational action.

    It’s time to follow the lead of young people, shift away from top-down approaches, and actively provide resources for robust youth co-leadership. According to global consensus, young people have a fundamental right to actively and meaningfully engage in all matters that affect their lives. For international development organizations, this means offering space, support, and compensation that youth need and deserve to co-create a more-gender equal future — a future from which they have the most to gain and to lose.

    We created the 14-person Young Leaders Program Alumni Committee, with an honorarium for their valuable expertise, to advise us on strategy and implementation of the Young Leaders Program and ideate youth co-creation opportunities. This committee provides invaluable guidance to ensure the Young Leaders Program models meaningful youth engagement and co-leadership, and effectively meets the needs of Young Leaders on the ground.

    Women Deliver also hosts Multi-Country Workshops to foster capacity strengthening, knowledge sharing, and coordinated advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and gender equality. Starting in 2021, these workshops are now designed and led by a Young Leader Planning Committee representing the regions where the workshops take place. They are in the driver’s seat as they craft workshop content and programming, while Women Deliver provides logistical support and the virtual space to gather. This co-created process has led to more targeted — and impactful — workshops that cater to Young Leaders’ specific needs and build capacity in the issue areas where it’s most needed.

Delegates taking a group photo on stage at the Deliver for Good Campaign side event “Leveraging National Movements for Global Change” at the Women Deliver 2019 Conference in Vancouver, Canada.

3. Elevate diverse voices and support organizations working on the ground.

    Incusion and participation have to be integrated into the mission of development work, not a one-off tactic or strategy. Diverse, resilient feminist and women’s rights organizations and movements are – and must always be positioned as – the key drivers of change for gender equality and women’s rights across the globe.

    Over the past two years, we have stepped back to shift power across every aspect of our organization’s activities, policies, programs, and behaviors, into the hands of the youth and women’s rights groups most impacted by our work. For example, in 2020, in partnership with Girl Effect, as well as with young people themselves, we worked to understand how youth in India, Malawi, and Rwanda use digital platforms to learn about their sexual and reproductive health (SRHR). This project was designed and executed by more than 160 adolescent girls and young women, who worked hand in hand with researchers on the ground in India, Malawi, and Rwanda to conduct interviews within their own communities, as well as to design questions, discuss results, and generate recommendations. Moving forward, we must involve girls and women in all aspects of data collection and evidence generation that impacts them. This will ensure that the local knowledge and skills needed to drive sustainable change in their own communities, regions, and countries are an integral part of effective advocacy and decision-making.

    We’re now handing the pen directly to Young Leaders and spotlighting the work of youth-led organizations during key advocacy moments. Last year, the Deliver for Good Campaign organized its first ever Continental Conversation — an idea conceived by partners in Kenya and Senegal — as a way to work together towards gender equality in the region. What was first envisioned as a one-off peer-to-peer sharing opportunity via videoconference became understood as a vital, first-of-its-kind Continental Conversation to bridge divides — some of which had never been crossed. Together, the Campaign’s country partners shared their own experiences, lessons, challenges, and successes in advancing gender equality, laying the groundwork for a cross-regional peer-to-peer learning model with the power to accelerate progress on girls’ and women’s health and rights in Kenya, in Senegal, and around the world.

    Over the past year, we have also co-convened multi-sectoral coalitions with diverse partners representing the intersectional identities of girls and women. For example, as part of the SRHR & Climate Justice Coalition, we’re working on collective action and coordinated advocacy in partnership with more than 60 representatives from a wide range of civil society organizations. The Coalition is working to advance SRHR and gender equality in the context of climate change from an intersectional and climate justice approach.

    The Coalition emerged from the need to break down silos between the SRHR and Climate Justice organizations and movements, facilitate knowledge sharing, jointly mobilize, and amplify the voices and priorities of grassroots organizations. These organizations are led by girls and women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and Indigenous people from LMICs, particularly those most affected by climate change and without continuous access to high-quality SRH services. The Coalition is currently raising awareness of the interlinkages of SRHR and climate change in order to ensure SRHR is a key part of climate change conversations and action strategies ahead of key policy moments, such as CSW66 and COP27.

4. Collect and present data that accurately represents the diverse needs of all girls and women.

    Sustainable progress — and lasting change — will take all of us. Over the past two years, we’ve focused on connecting advocates working across different issue areas and collecting gender-disaggregated data. The data is broken down into the many factors that shape people’s lives, including race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status, and socioeconomic class in order to drive collective action, the mainstay of transformative change. We also need to engage with data scientists from regions most impacted by this research.

    Last year, we partnered with Focus 2030 to carry out a survey of 17 countries on six continents — representing half of the world’s population. An overwhelming majority said they support gender equality, believe that women should be fully engaged in charting our path forward, and expect leaders – political and in business – to take meaningful action to bridge the gender divide. In centering the voices of citizens, we were able to effectively advocate for bigger, bolder commitments by governments and the private sector, ahead of the Generation Equality Forum.

As Women Deliver evolves and grows, we will continue to call upon our partners and funders, including in the private sector, to ensure that the international development world champions and secures robust, feminist funding and resources for women’s rights organizations, youth, and other marginalized communities. We hope you will join us in leveraging the changes set into motion during the pandemic and the global reckoning in our sector. Let’s work together to bridge existing divides and form inclusive partnerships — between countries, sectors, and generations.

The authors are Kathleen Sherwin (CEO/President), Divya Mathew (Director, Policy & Advocacy), Julia Fan (Senior Manager, Youth Engagement), Gretchen Gasteier (Manager, Conference), Rachel Elliott (Senior Associate, Communications) of Women Deliver

IPS UN Bureau

 

Youths Trailblazing Paths in Sexual and Reproductive Health Ahead of ICFP Family Planning Conference

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Featured, Gender, Global, Headlines, Population, Poverty & SDGs, TerraViva United Nations, Women’s Health, Youth Thought Leaders

Youth Thought Leaders

Youth activists Peace Umanah, from Nigeria and Aurelia Naa Adjeley Sowah-Mensah from Ghana ensure that young people are made aware of their Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights. Credit: ICFP

Nairobi, Kenya, Mar 16 2022 (IPS) – Travelling in northern Nigeria, Peace Umanah noticed teenage girls with multiple children – they would be walking with one strapped to their back, holding another by hand and with a protruding belly.

“These were worrisome sights that got me thinking about whether these young girls knew about contraceptive choices or if they were not given information to make beneficial decisions.”

The same question weighed heavily on young Aurelia Naa Adjeley Sowah-Mensah from Ghana, who grew up in a community where teenage pregnancies are common – mirroring the situation in many developing countries.

These questions set the young women on a trailblazing path to change the trajectory of adolescent and teenage pregnancies in their countries.

The pair have joined forces with other young people, world leaders and actors in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) to give young people in every corner of the world much-needed tools to navigate their sexuality. They hope to remove SRHR-related challenges to enable young women to benefit from socio-economic growth and development opportunities.

“Through the International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) Youth Trailblazer Award, young leaders in the field of family planning and SRHR aged 18-35 years old were invited to submit creative short videos that integrate this year’s conference theme,” says Jose G Rimon II, director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Jose G Rimon II, director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Credit: ICFP

Rimon II, who is also the chair of ICFP’s International Steering Committee, tells IPS the videos “also highlighted youth perspectives, experiences, and voices in family planning and SRHR”.

The videos reflected the conference’s theme: ‘Universal Health Coverage and Family Planning: Innovate, Collaborate, Accelerate’.

Sowah-Mensah and Umanah were among 50 youth leaders working in family planning and SRHR awarded scholarships to attend ICFP this year in Pattaya City, Thailand, on November 14-17, 2022.

Other award winners include Tanaka Chirombo from Malawi, Alison Hoover from Atlanta, USA, and Muhammad Sarim (Saro) Imram from Pakistan.

Awardees are from countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, selected from a pool of more than 300 youth worldwide who applied for the Youth Trailblazer Award. The award recognises youth leadership and innovation in family planning and SRHR.

“Selected youth demonstrated strong ideas and commitment, creative thinking that pushed the field forward and challenged norms, and successfully conveyed a clear and powerful message,” says Rimon II.

Youth Trailblazer Award winners will be integrated throughout the ICFP, the world’s largest scientific conference on family planning and reproductive health, to amplify and highlight the voices of young leaders globally, he adds.

“Awardees will actively participate in planning activities for the ICFP, including integral participation on the ICFP subcommittee(s) of their choice, engagement as speakers and moderators at sessions, as well as other conference engagement opportunities that will magnify the voices, perspectives, and experiences of the youth.”

Youth participation will bring to life ICFP’s stance that countries’ universal health coverage packages should include youth-friendly family planning and SRH products and services.

“As of 2021, the modern contraceptive prevalence rate shows only 17 percent of all women of reproductive age in Nigeria use contraceptives,” Umanah says.

In the absence of youth-friendly services, myths and misconceptions influence young people’s understanding of contraceptives. She says they sometimes use lime, soda, antibiotics, and salt to prevent unplanned pregnancies.

Adolescent and teenage pregnancies are the most pressing issues. Consequences include life-threatening health complications and the risk of missing out on lifelong learning and earning opportunities.

According to government statistics, one in every five girls in Kenya between the ages of 15 to 19 is either pregnant or already a mother. Complications during pregnancy and childbirth are a leading cause of death for 15- to 19-year-old girls in this East African nation.

As a youth champion engaging adolescents and young people, Umanah says the cohort needs safe spaces free of stigma and judgment, where they can find answers and solutions to their SRHR needs.

“For young women and girls, being able to speak up and be heard is critical. Social media tools, such as 9ja Girls Now, gives girls a platform to get connected across distances,” Umanah observes.

“9ja Girls is a Facebook platform and a safe space where girls learn and ask questions about love, life and health and find answers.”

Sowah-Mensah is an SRHR mentor of adolescent girls and young women under the Girl Boss initiative with the Youth Action Movement (YAM) of the Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana.

Without support, Sowah-Mensah says, “some girls exchange sex for food or money, ending up in unplanned pregnancies. To avoid stigma, they turn to unsafe ways (to terminate the pregnancy), such as grinding and consuming glass bottles or drinking a mixture of sugar and alcohol. Some lose their lives.”

A dedicated ICFP Youth Pre-conference will take place November 11-13 to support youth leaders and their programmatic work, advocacy, and research.

Rimon II says youth involvement is the “best way to ensure diverse voices are heard and strategies are developed that are sustainable, inclusive, culturally competent and representative of sexual and reproductive health and rights at the global level.”

SRHR youth experts such as Sowah-Mensah and Umanah agree.

Sowah-Mensah says young people are the demographic majority and a powerful instrument for development because they have many innovative ideas.

“But a large percentage of our leaders are not young and are thus unable to address young people’s most pressing needs for SRHR services. You have one generation making bodily autonomy decisions on behalf of a totally different generation,” she says.

The awardees assert that the status quo must change to achieve a desirable outcome. Umanah says, “In designing solutions to challenges that face adolescent girls and young women, their concerns and voices should be the loudest. They should lead conversations towards desired solutions.”

ICFP is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins University and more than two dozen other public, private, and non-profit sponsors, including the World Health Organization and United Nations Population Fund.

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IPS UN Bureau Report

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